Wading in the murky world of digital advertising with Crossmedia’s Kamran Asghar

Kamran Asghar has had a front-row seat to the changing way ads are bought in the internet age. Asghar, who started the media agency Crossmedia in 2000, believes the ability to measure ads through Google and Facebook led marketers to overemphasize how much those metrics were worth.

“Because we got addicted to the idea that we could read a response, we felt like it was working.”

Savvy marketers know it’s not that simple. Variables like walled gardens, siloed media and creative strategies create complexity and confusion. He spoke with The Current Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik about why he’s spent his career trying to clean up the murky world of digital advertising in the latest episode of 5 Minutes With.

I want to know your origin story. You started your career agency side at Ogilvy, and after just three years, you co-founded Crossmedia. You’re going 25 years strong as global CEO. What was your catalyst?

I think we were just young and dumb to be honest with you. No, I mean, look, I was sitting inside WPP at the time. It was really Ogilvy when creative and media sat together in the same building. The folks at the corporate level decided they were going to unbundle media from creative — and at a time where media was really proliferating.

It was the early days of digital. I mean, this is pre-Google. It was clear that the integration of media and creative and at the time, the full funnel was necessary. So why would you separate the two?

What do you think is lost when media and creative are unbundled? And fast-forward here in 2025, how is that equation looking today?

Almost everything’s lost actually. It’s like the sound of one-hand clapping.

If you plan media in a silo without any idea of what the messaging is going to be, you’re simply reaching an audience blindly. And the inverse is true too.

You can create the best creative in the world, and if it doesn’t land in the right place, the right time, the right context, to the right audience, then the creative is worth nothing.

A decade ago, when I started covering advertising, I noticed that CMOs were very focused in on creative. Are you saying that’s flipped, or do you feel like CMOs are embracing that balance?

Yeah, I wouldn’t paint all CMOs with the same brush. But I think what you saw was a real influx of response-based marketers with products and services that were designed to be sold in media channels.

Therefore, there was an overemphasis on targeting and reaching people on the internet became prevalent. And because we got addicted to the idea that we could read a response, we felt like it was working.

And for upstart DTCs, it was working because the more media you put in, the better it worked. And this is a distribution channel. Media is a sales channel in that regard. But for a sophisticated or mature marketer, it’s not that easy.

You have to be building that long-term brand as you’re also performing.

Always. You’re always building your brand. I remember back in the early days when we started, the former CMO of Coca-Cola, Sergio Zyman, came into Ogilvy and said, “At Coke, we treat every truck as an impression.” That’s kind of old-school thinking today, but if you really think about all the different access points people have to your brand, media is just one of them.

I want to talk about objectivity and transparency. On a scale of 1 to 10, how important do you think those things are? And on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do people realize it?

On a scale of importance, It’s an 11. It’s a 20. The idea that the industry allows for intransparency to me is unacceptable.

Every marketer, every client should have full media operational transparency to what’s happening in their ecosystem. They should know what they’re paying for. They should know where it’s going. They should know if their bills have been paid.

On a scale of 1 to 10, is it happening? Negative one.

This is a murky industry, and there’s a lot of conflicting interests. And everybody seems to want, particularly the ad tech community, a piece of the chain. That adds confusion, complexity and cost.

And so at Crossmedia, we have spent our entire existence trying to bring clarity, objectivity and neutrality in the decision-making of media. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of forces working against that.

You have to look no further than the walled gardens to understand that they’re in the best interests of serving themselves. I’ve never met somebody at Google or Meta or now Amazon who didn’t think that they could solve all of their marketers’ problems. And the world just doesn’t work that way.

So you really need neutral advisers. I liken it to the financial services industry. If you have a financial adviser, you want them only serving the interest in what makes you money and not in selling you products or solutions that make them money.